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A French general has defended France's response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, saying his troops did not give so much as a bullet to the perpetrators and did not immediately grasp the scale of the killing, sources said Sunday.

General Jean-Claude Lafourcade was questioned over claims that France's U.N.-mandated Operation Turquoise, which he led, left ethnic Tutsis to be slaughtered by Hutu killers in the western Bisesero hills in June 1994, sources close to the case said.

French soldiers had been deployed in Rwanda a few days earlier under U.N. instructions to stop the genocide that had begun in April, and which three months later had left at least 800,000 people dead, most of them Tutsis.

In 2005 survivors filed a complaint in France, saying the French troops had on June 27, 1994 vowed to return to Bisesero, but when they came back three days later, it was too late for hundreds of Tutsis who were massacred.